Face it: Google runs your life. The search giant turned web ecosystem owns your email, calendar and even your voicemails. Your most important data lives on Google’s servers. What you may not realise is that, despite the quality of Google’s products, someone else is doing it better — and placing all your eggs in Google’s basket isn’t necessarily the best thing. Here’s a look at alternative services you can use in place of Google’s web apps. More »
Microsoft’s search engine Bing launched in Australia back in June 2009. We still don’t have many of the features of the US version for Australian users, but Microsoft says the site’s results are now relevant enough to locals to justify removing the ‘beta’ tag from the site. More »
Bing’s mobile web app just got an update for mobile devices that support HTML5 standards, which means iOS and Android. Aside from getting a glossy new UI, location-based search results, and the ability to find apps for the iPhone, Bing Mobile now spits out real-time data too. [Bing]
A decade and a half ago, one of the big attractions of using a service like Yahoo! was its directory listings: relevant links sorted into categories. These days, efficient search sites mean no-one cares about that kind of thing so much, but Bing’s newly launched Visual Search still feels a bit like that, only with pictures and somehow less useful. More »
Australian users have generally got a lousy deal with local search features on Microsoft’s Bing site, but it has added one useful feature this weekend: movie times when you search on a current movie name. The feature got off to a slightly rocky start on Saturday, but now seems to work pretty well, displaying details directly on the Bing site and without needing to add “movie times” as a keyword.
Many Bing services in Australia lag well behind the US site, but the local Maps implementation has just added a potentially useful feature: live traffic information from Suna for Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. More »
